Q. We are restoring a historical home in Naples Florida and my paint guy
wants to use Duron paint. How do you feel that holds up under these weather
conditions?

A. Thanks for your email, but I don't know about the performance if individual
paints. The only source of which I am aware, that compares the quality of house
pants is Consumer Reports. They look at the hiding power of the pigment, scrubbability
and washability, exterior exposure and other properties. Other laboratories
are capable of performing similar tests, but I am not aware that they publish
their results to the public. You can access Consumer Reports at www.consumerreports.com
and search for "paints". You will find several articles on this topic, but you
will need to subscribe before you can have access to the reports.

In general I can tell you that the quality of paint depends in large part on
how much you pay. The more expensive the paint, the more likely it contains
higher quality ingredients. The less you pay, the less you get in terms of quality.
Since paints are highly competitive consumer products, you can assume that competing
vendors make a very small profit on their products. Bearing that in mind, you
can assume that higher priced paints from competing vendors will have similar
quality levels.